The other important event of the weekend was that my mum and dad came up. They have a van, which is a complete tax dodge, but nevermind. This means that I will have no trouble getting my stuffs back home in the holidays. They also brought my eeepc.

Now the eeepc does live up to its name: it’s very [squ]eee and quite [w]eee. There are a few little gems about it: the charger is like an oversized phone charger, for example, and there’s a light on the webcam that tells you when it’s being used. The user manual is pretty priceless. Version E3509, which I found and mirrored here: http://www.srcf.ucam.org/~dl325/scratch/e3509_15G06Q001001.pdf
gems include:
“The solid-state disk drive’s head retracts when the power is turned OFF to prevent scratching of the solid-state disk drive surface during transportation” — 1-5
The finger in 1-7 pointing to the power button
Section 5 contains some really useful hints for optimising windows XP for low disk usage. It seems that you can get windows (without office obv, and no backup partition) into about 2GB. The Xandros they have installed contains a complete recovery partition and OOo, Konq and Firefox, Kontact and Thunderbird, and webcam utilities etc. and leaves you with ~ a gig (can’t remember, and I need to run: will add the real number later.)

The only peeves I have are the windows-like “single user, who’s able to do pretty much everything” feel, and the large quantities of bespoke that have been piled on (you can’t set konq to do tabbed browsing, for example, and they’ve renamed *everything* apart from firefox) Also, it took Tom K to show me where the ~ was, after 5 minutes of my complaining.